Article : retail
Online and physical #retailers
have finally kissed and made up
“Everything old is new again” strikes a chord when we see online retail giants like Amazon
experimenting with opening physical bricks and mortar store and it all comes down to maturity.
T
he red cordial hyper online shopping era
phase has thankfully passed and with it we
are returning to demanding the best and most
appropriate retail experience regardless of whether its
online offline or a mixture of both and the appropriate
buying experience will be dynamically be determined
by the transaction and the people involved.
Amazon is reported to be opening up to 400 USA
physical bookstores, and although these have not
been confirmed, if they do eventuate they will be
unlike the large format bookstores of old Borders and
instead will the Amazon retailing secret sauce, which
when boiled down is that Amazon is an incredible
logistics company, that know which products
customers want, where and when and can get it to
them at a great price and super-fast.
These stores will be merchandised with a smaller range
of books personalised to that location using Amazon’s
analytics of what that regions interests and past buying
habits are; the books will be front facing and using an
app on your mobile phone you’ll be able to explore its
price, contents, reviews, buy it there and then or buy
it online for delivery. Using this business model and
smarts Amazon can dramatically lower the traditional
costs of running a retail store and if they wish could
also use these outlets to digitally show and push
anything from their vast digital product catalogue.
In these new blended digital physical stores, it’s not
just about selling, it may be about showrooming or
webrooming (digital showrooms), it may be about
customer engagement, it may be about see and feel,
or brand experience and progression, or for a myriad
of other marketing reasons.
The other driving force is growing digital retail fatigue,
with recent research finding that there are 800,000+
on line retail store making it harder to be found and
the costs of key words, used to drive traffic to sites,
increasingly dramatically with the likes of Macys and
Nordstrom each spending around US$6.4 million
annually to get the online jump on their competitors.
No longer does one size have to fit all as we finally
return to a maturity level where retail is retail,
customers are customers and the coming together of
the two will be dictated by the where, how, when and
why of the transaction and the ability of the retailer to
engage and satisfy their customer.
In Australia we’ve had Kogan trial physical retailing,
Milan Direct announcing a roll out of stores and pop
up stores galore each stuffed with online retailers
posing as bricks and mortar sellers , these and many
others are heralding in an devolution in retailing.
We’re going back to the core of great retailing, where
sales are the end purpose, but to get a sale you’ve got
to give the customer what they want.
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